Runaway Emotions – By Jeff Schreve

This book is based on a series of sermons by Jeff Schreve, pastor of First Baptist Church in Texarkana, Texas. In it, he explores eight different emotions and why they hit us so hard: embarrassment, loneliness, frustration, worry, anger, guilt, discontentment, and depression. Even more, he goes on to describe the potentially positive impact that these emotions can have on us – if we will let them, instead of either reacting negatively or ignoring the emotions altogether.

I so wish I could give it more stars, because I was so hopeful about this book, but I can only give this book three stars. I do appreciate the author’s use of personal stories as well as his Biblical guidance for handling negative emotions that have the potential to runaway with us. I also think that this book has the possibility to be an excellent “in a nutshell” resource for someone looking for some general guidance on dealing with strong, negative emotions.

However, as is touched upon the introduction, this book is written in the style of a sermon series. I have nothing at all against sermon series or even books based upon them, but when written in the style that a sermon is spoken, they are difficult to read and stay “plugged into” along the way. This book would have been much easier to follow and focus on had I listened to it as an audiobook. It would have been an interesting sermon series to hear, and I have no doubt that I would have learned from it – but the writing style made it difficult to keep myself from skimming instead of reading closely.

I also feel like the chapters themselves did not go into much detail or depth about managing and/or learning from each negative emotion – of course, this is to be expected if you think about each chapter as if it were a single Sunday’s sermon. Therefore, I think this book would be an excellent tool to have on hand for someone to pull off the shelf and read the chapter that focuses upon the negative emotion with which they’re struggling – a “spring board” of sorts, where they can then dig deeper elsewhere if needed.

All in all, this book was worth reading but I didn’t leave it feeling I’d learned anything new or that I would reread it again in the future. If you’re looking for some general guidance on how to tame & learn from negative emotions before they run away with you instead of in-depth guidance, this would be an excellent book to read or recommend.